Actionable Steps to Overcome the Most Common Growth Marketing Challenges, Responding to McKinsey’s Insights on Modern Marketing Challenges

By Brock Pernice
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Connect with me on LinkedIn

The recent McKinsey article, "Connecting for Growth," shines a spotlight on the demanding landscape facing today’s marketing leaders. It clearly outlines the growing complexity CMOs face as their roles expand into areas like generative AI, innovation, and performance management—all while bearing the weight of driving growth and maximizing efficiency. McKinsey doesn’t just name the issue; it highlights the gap between what needs to be done and the readiness of many organizations to do it. This diagnosis is sharp, but like many industry analyses, it stops short of giving leaders actionable steps to close this gap.

I'd like to offer my perspective on what leaders can do next. Drawing from my experiences working with businesses—particularly in complex, highly-regulated industries—there are practical steps marketing organizations can take right now to turn these challenges into opportunities.

Turning Complexity Into Progress

McKinsey is right to call for a “fit-for-purpose operating model” for marketing. But how do businesses get there? Based on my hands-on work helping organizations modernize their marketing, I believe addressing these four areas can make a transformational difference:

Rethink Your Operating Model

McKinsey’s survey shows that many marketing leaders attribute their struggles to organizational silos and misaligned priorities. This rings true. Misaligned structures often slow everything—from decision-making to campaign execution. Businesses need to focus on breaking down these barriers. For instance, uniting teams with cross-functional initiatives that align sales, marketing, and operations allows decision-making to be faster and more strategic. Equally important is creating shared growth metrics that sync teams around the same success benchmarks. Strong leadership, clear processes, and an openness to adopt more agile ways of working are essential for this transformation.

1. Conduct a Cross-Functional Audit

• Action: Evaluate workflows and team interactions to identify silos and misaligned priorities. ‍
• Outcome: Gain visibility into bottlenecks and uncover opportunities for better alignment.

2. Establish Collaborative Teams
   

• Action: Form cross-functional groups with members from sales, marketing, and operations to tackle shared goals. ‍
• Outcome: Strengthened communication and alignment across departments.
  

3. Define Unified Growth Metrics
   

• Action: Develop KPIs that reflect collective success, such as revenue growth, customer acquisition, and lifetime value. ‍
• Outcome: Teams focus on common benchmarks, reducing misaligned objectives.

Harness Real-Time Data and Technology

A recurring theme in McKinsey’s analysis is the gap between the potential of tech-enabled marketing—like AI and advanced analytics—and what businesses are doing with it now. I’ve seen this disconnect firsthand. Companies have a wealth of customer data but often lack the ability—or infrastructure—to turn this data into real-time, actionable insights.

To make progress, leaders need to do two things. First, embed data at the very heart of their marketing strategies. This means moving beyond static reports to systems that continuously learn and evolve as new consumer behaviors emerge. Second, adopt tools and practices, like real-time audience segmentation and dynamic campaign optimization. These tools don’t just improve the customer experience—they drastically improve marketing ROI by aligning actions with tangible outcomes.

1. Conduct a Data and Technology Audit

• Action: Review existing customer data sources, tools, and workflows to identify gaps in accessibility, accuracy, and usability. ‍
• Outcome: Gain clarity on what data you have (and what you don’t have), where it lives, and how well it supports marketing, sales and operational objectives.

2. Create a Unified Data Strategy
   

• Action: Bring together data from key sources into a single system to make it easier to access and use. Standardize how data is organized, set clear expectations for completeness, and put processes in place to keep it clean and up-to-date.  ‍
• Outcome: This approach creates clear, reliable, and easy-to-use information, helping teams work better together, target more effectively, and make smarter decisions.

3. Establish an Enterprise Content Strategy

• Action: Develop an annual process to create content platforms, audit existing and planned content, identify gaps, assign collaborative content creation roles, and address market-specific content needs.
• ‍Outcome: Establish a strong foundation for content alignment and efficiency, enabling the teams to deliver personalized customer experiences while improving ROI.

Foster a Culture of Experimentation

One of the most freeing shifts I see in successful marketing teams is a commitment to experimentation. McKinsey notes that many organizations struggle with agility and test-and-learn capability, and this mirrors what I’ve observed. Too often, marketing teams shy away from calculated risk because they’re captives of rigid processes or short-term KPIs.

The solution? Free these teams to experiment. Encourage light-touch tests and rapid-cycle pilots that focus on learning rather than perfection. This approach not only improves campaigns over time but builds confidence within teams to propose bolder shifts in approach. Businesses that nurture this test-and-learn culture also unlock a faster road to discovering effective, scalable growth tactics.

1. Encourage Light-Touch Testing

• Action: Empower teams to run small-scale, low-risk tests to try new ideas without overhauling existing strategies. ‍
• Outcome: Teams build confidence, learn quickly, and refine approaches based on real-world feedback.

2. Implement Rapid-Cycle Pilots

• Action: Introduce short-term pilot programs that prioritize quick learning over perfection. ‍
• Outcome: Faster discovery of effective tactics and improved adaptability in changing markets.

3. Create Safe Spaces for Innovation

• Action: Develop a framework where teams are supported in taking calculated risks without fear of failure. ‍
• Outcome: Encourages creativity and bold thinking, leading to more innovative, scalable growth strategies.

Align Marketing with Revenue and Transformation Goals

McKinsey highlights the expectation for marketing to drive revenue and transformation, yet the systems to support this are often underdeveloped. Simply put, many organizations still see marketing as a cost center rather than a revenue engine. This belief is outdated and limits what marketing can accomplish.

Leaders need to equip marketing teams with tools, processes, and strategies that directly link their efforts to business outcomes. The fastest way to do this is through a clear framework that provides full-funnel visibility, allowing organizations to measure the impact of every touchpoint on growth. From experience, I can confidently say that teams with these tools and insights can focus not just on generating leads but on driving measurable, sustainable revenue growth.

1. Establish a Unified Marketing and Sales Funnel
   

• Action: Create a standardized funnel across the enterprise with universally agreed-upon definitions for each stage (e.g., suspect, MQL, SQL, contact, opportunity) to ensure consistency.
• ‍Outcome: A clear, shared framework that improves efficiency, eliminates confusion, and enables smoother transitions between marketing and sales efforts.
  

2. Develop Shared Terminology for Lead Management
   

• Action: Build a common language for marketing and sales to use throughout the lead development process, ensuring clarity and alignment in strategies and execution. ‍
• Outcome: Improved communication and collaboration between teams, fostering a seamless approach to lead nurturing and conversion.
  

3. Set Conversion Benchmarks and Goals
   

• Action: Define benchmarks and goals for all conversion points within the funnel to guide forecasting, reporting, and performance analysis. ‍
• Outcome: Enhanced visibility into the funnel’s effectiveness, enabling both teams to track progress and make data-driven decisions.

The Way Forward

Ultimately, McKinsey’s article serves as a call to action. It pushes marketing and business leaders to reimagine how they’ll tackle both the complexity and opportunity of modern marketing. And while the "what" is clear, the "how" often feels intangible. My perspective is simple—businesses don’t need to solve everything at once, but they do need to start moving forward with intention.

Begin with the basics—align teams, anchor decisions in data, and empower experiments. By progressively tackling these challenges, organizations will find themselves better equipped to accomplish what McKinsey rightly calls the "dual agenda" of growth and performance.

For those looking for a more structured way to approach this transformation, my team and I at TrueVoice Growth Marketing developed a tried-and-tested framework that draws on these principles to help businesses modernize and operationalize growth marketing. It’s designed to help business leaders quickly overcome these hurdles and turn their aspirations into results.

The opportunity is there, and the future of marketing belongs to the organizations willing to adapt, align, and accelerate.

If you'd like to learn more about how TrueVoice's Full Funnel Growth Marketing Framework can help drive measurable growth, feel free to reach out to me directly at Brock.Pernice@TrueVoiceGrowth.com. You can also explore the framework in greater detail by visiting this link: TrueVoice Full Funnel Growth Marketing Framework.

Link to McKinsey article

Link to TrueVoice framework

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